Читать книгу The Times History of the World - Richard Overy - Страница 40

Written sources from this period increasingly help to reconstruct the history of north Africa, the Nilotic Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. For the rest of Africa, archaeology remains the primary source and, since research and evidence are currently meagre, for large parts of the continent the past still awaits discovery.

In the last millennium BC, north Africa was inhabited by the ancestors of the modern Berbers. At the coast these people came into contact with a variety of foreigners. The first were the Phoenicians, seafaring merchants who established trading settlements westwards from Tripoli and founded Carthage towards the end of the 9th century. Egypt at this time was politically weak and succumbed to a variety of foreign powers, among them the kingdom of Kush, based at Napata, whose kings ruled as the 25th Dynasty (c. 770–664). From the 3rd century BC, Rome began to assert its power in the region, successfully challenging Carthaginian supremacy in the western Mediterranean. Thereafter Roman control was extended along the north African coast and, in 30 BC, Egypt was conquered. By the time the Roman empire began to weaken in the 4th and early 5th centuries AD, Christianity was widespread in its African provinces and remained unchallenged until the Arab invasions of the 7th century brought Islam to Africa.

By the 4th century BC the Kushite kingdom had moved south to Meroë, where it flourished until the 2nd century AD. Its subsequent decline was probably owed, in part, to the rise of the Aksumite kingdom in northern Ethiopia. In the mid-4th century, Aksum adopted Christianity as its official religion. Although Christian influences must have spread southwards from Egypt into Nubia towards the end of the Meroitic period, it was not until the 6th century that Christianity was introduced into the region. In the following century, the Arab invasion of Egypt began a process of Islamization that spread slowly southwards into Nubia. The rise of Islam was also a factor in the decline of Aksum, which had ceased to exist as a political entity by about AD 700.

IRON-WORKING AND FARMING

Almost certainly it was the Phoenicians who introduced bronze- and ironworking to north Africa. In west Africa, iron was being used by the mid-first millennium BC. The development of an urban settlement at Jenne-Jeno from about 250 BC onwards, was probably facilitated by the use of iron tools, which helped agriculturalists to till the heavy clay soils of the inland Niger delta. The earliest evidence of iron use in southern west Africa is associated with the Nok culture, famous for its terracotta sculptures. The early iron-using communities of eastern and southern Africa show such a remarkable degree of homogeneity that they are viewed as a single cultural complex, which first appeared on the western side of Lake Victoria around the mid-1st millennium BC and had spread as far south as Natal by the 3rd century AD. In addition to iron technology, this complex is associated with the beginnings of crop cultivation, livestock herding and settlement. South of Tanzania it is also linked to the manufacture of pottery. In Namibia and Cape Province, which were not settled by these ironusing farmers, some groups had acquired domestic sheep as early as the first two centuries AD. At about the same time a distinctive Cape coastal pottery appears, but others continued with their ancient way of life, living in mobile groups, hunting, gathering and making stone tools.